Edmund White - Our Young Man

With great regularity Guy intended to visit Andrés in prison and Fred in the hospital and felt perpetually guilty, as if he were responsible for their separate but horrible destinies. The first time he saw Andrés shorn and pale and skinny in his orange jumpsuit, he was thunderstruck. His arms looked so thin and helpless, his bald spot was gleaming, his face seemed to have sprouted five new moles, with the bad food he appeared to have grown a horrible little belly — not really! It was just a fold in his prison clothes. Guy could have slapped himself for the disparaging thought.

That afternoon, after he sat beside Fred and held his hand for fifteen minutes, Guy walked over to the Sheridan Square gym. All the rituals of his life had become so stale — and the perpetual guilt made him angry! He didn’t want to feel like a bad person who brought disaster to everyone around him. He was listless with self-hatred and an irrational anger that could never find a rod to strike but idly played across the surface of his mind. As he trudged upstairs to the second floor and the gym’s open door, he could smell the old sweat, hear the melancholy ring of dropped barbells, and he prepared himself to see those mastodons with their stained gym clothes, pockmarked faces, and neck veins about to pop.

But when he breached the entrance he saw identical blond twins, teenagers, maybe Finns like those models on the fold-out cover of L’Uomo Vogue . After Guy changed, he worked out near them so he could study them. They cheered him up. It was amusing to certify that they were identical down to the tiniest detail — the blond fuzz on their calves; the pointy nose that swerved to one side, thinned out, and turned red near the tip; the long eyetooth that gleamed with saliva; the bulging shoulder blades under identical crisp T-shirts with an unfamiliar logo — shoulder blades like unsprouted wings. They both touched their toes at the same moment and, as their T-shirts rose up, Guy could see identical black moles staining the intricately turned carpentry of their white, white waists. They were just as much mirror images in their behavior, murmuring to each other, exchanging fractional nods of encouragement, one bending to tie the laces of the other, but everything unemphatic. They were like gods posing as shepherds.

Their eyes lingered on Guy for an instant as if the camera, panning across his face and body, got stuck. It was such a slight hesitation as almost to go unremarked, but they both must have noticed Guy had intercepted their glance, because both boys blushed deeply, charmingly. A blush for them was nearly a cardiac arrest. Guy feared they’d faint due to the sudden concentration of blood. What did they see that instant when they looked at him? Compared to their freshness, he was wilted, lined, thick. Only in New York, where everyone was thirty-something, did he appear young. People had agreed he was young, as if by consensus. It was an article of faith. But these twins’ skin was so fine-pored, so rosy; their arms were so firm, nothing was flabby, there was nothing ropy about their necks; they were dramatically thin but not starved-looking. They looked healthy. They hadn’t been on diets. Their heads were too large for their bodies but their features were still small, neat, like entries written in a copperplate hand. The skin fit as neatly as a lady’s glove on their long fingers, not a bit of sag or jiggle or looseness.

The twins must have been so embarrassed by the shared blush that they studiously ignored Guy for the rest of their workout and skipped their shower and hurried off still in their sweaty shorts. Guy thought they might be models, very young models, and he wished he’d seen them naked. They must live nearby.

That night he talked to Pierre-Georges. It was a relief to speak in French — he got all of Guy’s allusions and shorthand and his muted sort of bitchiness. “Do you think Americans are vulgar? Like peasants?”

“Don’t insult our poor peasants,” Pierre-Georges said loftily.

“So you think French peasants are better than typical Americans?”

“You’ve been here too long to be able to say ‘typical.’ There are all kinds of Americans.”

“But they’re crude,” Guy protested. “They talk so loud and sprawl. There’s nothing tidy about them. They’re materialists — nothing spiritual or cultured.”

“Don’t forget you’re from Clermont-Ferrand, not Auteuil. People sprawl in your département . What’s gotten into you?”

“Why are we here in this awful country?” Guy wailed. While Pierre-Georges paused for him to elaborate, Guy collapsed under the weight of everything, his life, this country. Finally Pierre-Georges said in a soft, consoling voice, “Put on your new cashmere blazer and I’ll take you out to the Casa De Pré, you always liked that one.”

“What will we talk about?” Guy asked plaintively.

“ Écoute, ” Pierre-George said, vexed or pretending to be. “Listen — you’re exaggerating. I’ll see you there in thirty minutes. Don’t keep me waiting.”

“Forty-five?”

They ordered comfort food, a risotto with spring vegetables and a fruity bottle of Vouvray. Pierre-George sent the bread and butter back: too tempting. “Are you very sad about Andrés?”

Guy stared at Pierre-Georges and then just nodded gravely. Finally he said, “My life is such a mess. I thought it was supposed to be glamorous and enviable. That’s what Interview said about me: glamorous, enviable. That’s what After Dark said in its last issue in 1982: ‘Gay, glittery, and glamorous.’”

“Only you remember that,” Pierre-Georges said sourly.

“Yes, I’m sad. Crushed. I hate this country, with its puritanism and heartlessness and filthy diseases.”

“And that’s all Reagan’s fault, I suppose?”

“Whose?” Guy asked, genuinely not recognizing the name.

“ Flute! ” Pierre-George lisped. It amused him to sound like a flustered French matron and to use out-of-date genteel swear words. “You honestly don’t know who the president of the United States is?”

“Oh. Her! ”

“They’re going to revoke your green card.”

“Good! I can’t stand it here another day.”

“Why?” Pierre-Georges asked. “People here think you’re some sort of Norman aristocrat with a chateau. In France no one would be fooled. Just look at how you hold yourself at table.”

Guy stopped slumping and sat upright. “Who cares about all that?” he asked.

“French people do. If you go back you’ll have to deal with all that. Here you can reinvent yourself. And this is where the money is — important now that you’re in your sunset years. How long have you been in the business?”

That night in bed Guy surprised himself because he was happy to be alone. He loved Andrés, he really did. No one had ever been so devoted to him. Guy realized that his way of measuring someone’s devotion was a feminine aspect of his nature; only women wanted men who were devoted. Men wanted men and women who were hard to get. But he’d given himself entirely to Andrés; he’d never been so immersed in another man. But that night when he masturbated he didn’t think of Andrés in his orange jumpsuit and bald spot. No, he imagined he was between the identical twins, that their bodies were as smooth as the alabaster lamps he’d seen once in Volterra. The boys were clambering over him in his fantasy like Sherpas on the slopes, everything coordinated between them. He fell asleep and dreamed they were all swimming together in some sort of low-ceilinged turbulent pool fed by hot springs. The boys were slippery as eels and in his dream one penis exploded in his anus and the identical penis flooded his mouth. Guy smiled in his sleep.